Somewhat NP Argentinians bound for Germany

[Dave Monroe]

... in the meantime, curious as to any thought anyone might have in re: Pynchon and
the Soviets, Pynchon and the Cold War.  Starting but certainly not limited to
Tchitcherine, who as I recall alludes at least to, though is not necesarily
equivalent with, a real-historical referent.  I'm a big fan of that New Turkish
Alphabet episode, myself ...

jporter wrote:

> > From: Dave Monroe <monroe at mpm.edu>
> >
> >
> > .... well, I'd been under the impression that, despite the Soviet headstart in
> > the space race (which no doubt parallelled the arms race), even as JFK, for
> > example, was touting a Soviet ICBM threat, the actuality of the matter was, he
> > was overstating the case (to some extreme--I think the USSR had something like
> > maybe four ICBMs) for the budgetary and PR benefit of the military.
>
> Four that worked. Me thinks you are understating the technological
> superiority of the Soviets w/r/t rocket technology. It's not just a matter
> of number, Dave, when it comes to H-bombs. I am sure the embarrasing launch
> pad failures of the first U.S. attempts to match Sputnik- with much smaller
> satellites- were not staged to demonstrate our deficienies. It does say
> something about the nature of our society, however, that we got to watch
> those failures in between *Howdy Doody* and The Mickey Mouse Club* Who knows
> how many failures occurred in the USSR prior to Sputnik, or how many
> Gulagees were worked to death to pay for them?
>
> > My next
> > step after the Nazi a-bomb project was to get to the Soviets, have things like
> > David Holloway's Stalin and the Bomb and Paul Josephson's Red Atom, as well as
> > James Harford's biography of Korolev (of Soviet space program fame), but he're
> > langushing in stacks right now.  Only so much time, esp. when one finds
> > oneself rereading much previous research ...
>
> Yes, but the fact that you have chosen to look west for boogey men before
> you look east does say something, doesn't it? I'm sure their is plenty of
> evil to be ferreted out on all sides, but before we begin the long march to
> truth it might be worth questioning the direction of our first step, if only
> to acknowledge our unavoidable prejudices.
>
> I commend the obvious thoroughness of your readings in this area. I do not
> have the luxury of matching your ardor, but I refuse to be swayed by reading
> lists alone. There is something to be said for commonsense and the memory of
> shared experience.
>
> > Still, the question is, Cold War expediency vs. I don't know, moral rectitude,
> > justice, whatever.  Certainly, the reason why Truman did an about face from
> > both Roosevelt's and his own previously stated policies against using Nazi
> > scientists was the Cold War.  Whether or not the American use of Nazi rocket
> > (and then some) scientists ultimately prevented, ultimately will prevent
> > Mutually Assured Destruction is a matter for history, alternate or otherwise,
> > to determine ((as) if it ever will, ever can be), but ...
>
> That the Cold War did allow for the creation of the internet, however, is
> not disputed. Whether or not the internet and WWW continue to be a means by
> which specialized information is taken out of the hands of elites, of all
> stripes, and used to empower those who would otherwise be beholden to those
> elites, is another question for history- appropriately decentralized in its
> recording, dissemination and interpretation.
>
>
> > .... but to note just one example (given in Cockburn an St. Clair's Whiteout),
> > under Operation Overcast, begun, by the way, before Truman had rescinded the
> > ban against the importation of Nazi scientists, aomngst von Braun's team there
> > was on George Richkey, slavemaster at the Mittelwerk, over the Dora
> > concentration camp labor used there--and Dora, while, I believe, not primarily
> > a concentration camp for Jews, nonetheless eventually did indeed have Jews
> > amongst its prisoners, certainly by the time that Gravity's Rainbow is set,
> > but the point is, it WAS a concentration camp, it WAS part of the Holocaust,
> > in which, indeed, groups beyond the Jews were perscuted, tortured, killed.
> > "In retaliation against sabotage in the missile plant--prisoners would urinate
> > on elctrical equipment, causing spectavular malfunctions--Richkey would hang
> > them twelve at a time, with wooden sticks shoved into their mouths to muffle
> > their cries.  In the Dora camp itself he  regarded children as useless mouths
> > and instructed the SS guards to club them to death, which they did." (Cockburn
> > and St. Clair, Whiteout, p. 167).  He went on to Wright Field, Dayton, Ohio,
> > where he oversaw security for Nazi researchers, and further served as the
> > translator for the Mittelwerk records.  "He thus had the opportunity, which he
> > used to  the utmost, to setroy any material compromising to his colleagues and
> > himself" (ibid.).  Such, er, "characters" abounded, and, i would note, we
> > didn't even really hold true to that Nuremburg code against using Nazi medical
> > research, say, experiments on (the living bodies and corpses of) concentration
> > camp prisoners in low-pressure chambers.  The next question might be, well,
> > why not extract some good from evil, some gold from shit?  The problem, well,
> > to redeem th Holocaust? "All's well that ends well"?  Not to my mind ..
>
> You won't find me defending horrendous behavior such as you allude to above.
> And I will even allow you the "Such, er, 'characters' abounded,..." which
> you tag on the end, but do not document. But all the gruesome details you
> provide serve to underscore the absence of a parallel investigation of the
> goings on within The Soviet rocket/industrial complex, and the gaping hole
> in the historical record of what happened to the tens of millions of people
> who were exterminated in its developement. At least The Holocaust is a
> reality that people can argue about. How many more millions of people would
> it take before it would no longer seem as if Kennedy, et. al, were
> "overstating" the Soviet threat?
>
> >
> > .... but why don't Cockburn and St. Clair discuss Stalin, the pogroms, the
> > gulags? Well, their book, Whiteout, IS subtitled "The CIA, Drugs and the
> > Press," it's specifically about the shady dealings of the CIA and its
> > predecessor organization, the OSS.  Can't cover everything everywhere.
>
> That seems unacceptable. Any investigative analysis which attempts to
> forcefully make the case for the culpability of the west- implicitly or
> explicitly- without a more balanced examination of the the historical
> context, must be suspect of being a work of propaganda to deflect attention
> from the Soviet activities at the time, or at least, of being a conscious
> choice to present a more marketable theme, No? Why?
>
> > Certainly, Stalin, the stalinist regime, was ultimately responsible for
> > killing far more Soviet citizens that Hitler, the Third Reich, was, for
> > killing Germans, but I think that perhaps the specificity of the Holocaust,
> > the Shoah, was in its unique bureaucratization, technologization,
> > industrialization of the process.
>
> I must respectfully disagree. Those processes were equally at work under
> Stalin, perhaps more so. Stalin, after all, may have been paranoid, but he
> was no mystic, nor did he harbor any quasi-religious sentimentality w/r/t
> "The Russian People" comparable to Hitler's "Aryanism". If anything, Stalin
> was even more bureaucratic and more dangerous. I am not at all denying
> Hitler's targeting of the Jews, nor the magnitude of The Shoah, but I do not
> believe it serves the jewish cause to assume the posture of eternal
> victimhood. In fact, that perpetuates Hitler's racism and clouds the facts.
> GR works against that process by empowering the marginalized rather than
> perpetuating their victimhood.
>
> jody